“I don’t… there’s no reason I should…”
The protest is weak, even to my ears.
Callum moves toward me.
I should stop him.
I should get up.
I should do anything in the world but stay right where I am, seated on his stiff settee, still as stone as he takes a seat beside me.
He rests a hand on my back.
Slowly, tentatively, like he’s not sure if I’m about to slap him away, or curse him or something. When I don’t, he starts moving it in gentle, steady strokes.
He’s warm. Warm enough to melt away more of my resistance as I lean into that touch, as I let him soothe me.
In my chest, that same stubborn tingle of magick stutters back into being.
It’s been quieter since I woke up—probably on account of the wholealmost dyingthing—but with Callum so close, apparently it needs to make sure I know it’s still there.
Stupid cursed Goddess magick.
“It’s not an easy thing, feeling like you can’t return home.”
“Home?” I scoff. “Hardly. My home is with my parents. With my… sister. Well, at least before we were shipped off to the coven.”
I tell him a little bit more about it—the way we were chosen to stay and train because our magick made us worthy, the endless competition and fear of not measuring up, the demands of the coven elders. The choice I made to leave and try a different life. The choice my sister made to stay.
What I don’t say?
I don’t say that the coven hall has some of my happiest memories in it, too. With Seren, with the friends I had before we became rivals, with the time I spent discovering my magick and what I was capable of.
It’s too hard to make sense of it, especially in the face of all the rest.
“So no,” I finish when I’ve given him the abridged version of two decades’ worth of baggage I’ve barely started to unpack. “Not exactly a home.”
“No, not a home,” he agrees, then thinks for a moment. “But perhaps somewhere you belonged, once, even if it was never meant to be the place you stayed?”
“Somewhere I belonged.” I turn the words and the idea over, examining them slowly. “Sure. I guess that’s fair. But never because of who I was, only for what I could give them. And when they saw parts of me that didn’t suit their picture of an ideal witch, they tried to force me to give them up. Fall in line.”
“What do you mean?” Callum asks. “As far as I can tell, you’re powerful beyond measure, and they were lucky to have you, fools to make it so you could not stay.”
I can’t help it, I laugh. “You don’t have to be so nice to me, you know. I haven’t exactly earned it.”
“You never have to earn it, Seren.”
He sounds so sincere. Helooksso sincere with that gleam in his crimson eyes and a softer expression on his face than I’ve ever seen there before.
I can’t look at it.
I can’t bear to see him looking at me like that, despite what he says.
“Well,” I say, determined to break any illusions he has about me, “I wasn’t a perfect witch. I wasn’t even a good one. I was always challenging my teachers, getting into trouble, bringingthe other girls with me when I wanted to break the rules. It was honestly a miracle I wasn’t expelled from the coven.”
“But you weren’t. There must have been a reason for that.”
“My magick.” My voice is hard, flat, with echoes of all the lectures Esme gave me over the years buried within it. “They’d never seen anything like it. The way I can find things, break wards and protections, the way there never seemed to be any stopping me.”
